The liberal advocacy group Americans United for Change says $77 is how much a full-time worker earning the $7.25 federal minimum wage has to spend each week after taxes and housing expenses are paid.

It challenged leaders to try to live on minimum wage for a week. The theory is if lawmakers see how hard it is to live on minimum wage, they will vote to increase it. Strickland and Ryan already support raising the minimum wage to $10.10.

Ryan, whose congressional wage is $174,000 a year, says it’s important for elected officials to understand such issues in more than an intellectual way.

“A lot of times our friends in the tea party movement or in the conservative political movement try to marginalize these men and women who work extremely hard in many jobs that those of us in Congress wouldn’t dare dream of doing,” he said during a conference call announcing the challenge.

According to Rea Hederman, executive vice president of the Buckeye Institute, a free-market group in Ohio, the average household income for a minimum-wage earner is $65,900.

“They are not the breadwinners of the family,” said Hederman, a former analyst at The Heritage Foundation. “They are second-income earners, teens, college kids or seniors supplementing their retirement income.”

Maggie Thurber is a reporter for Watchdog.org, a national network of investigative reporters covering waste, fraud and abuse in government. Watchdog.org is a project of the nonprofit Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity.

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